Board mulls water lease plan

The Pueblo Board of Water Works is huddling on how it might lease water in the upcoming year.

“There are a lot of factors we need to look at internally. Philosophically, we have to talk about how conservative we’re going to be,” said Alan Ward, water resources manager for the board.

The board typically leases about 10,000-20,000 acre-feet of water on the spot market annually to ditches, well associations and others who use it to supplement their own water rights or in some cases even as a primary source.

That’s just a thin slice of the more than 80,000 acre-feet generated by the board’s broad collection of water rights each year.